Your marketing department is one of the central pillars of your company - but it’s also a pillar that shouldn’t operate in isolation. More than ever, companies have to consider how every team integrates into the larger vision. When it comes to growth, you'll need to pull in design, development, and yes, marketing.
These tips for building your business will show you why you should be integrating your marketing efforts with everything else your company is doing.
What is Marketing?
You need to begin by defining what marketing actually is. Yes, it has something to do with increasing sales and leads - but then you have to ask what the point of the sales department is. Someone may tell you that marketing is about improving relationships between customers and the brand. But then you have to think about where your customer service team comes in.
Marketing is an intriguing department because it does all of these things and shares many of the responsibilities that other departments do. That's the reason why it cannot operate in a bubble: it has to be integrated with everything else your company is doing, because it operates across silos.
The Heart of Marketing
Branding is always the heart of your marketing efforts because it defines your audience, angle, unique selling points, and message. Branding is something that can be influenced by everything your company is doing. A mistake made by the finance department can impact your branding, for example.
Branding is about everything your company does, but marketers are the first line of defense. They are often given the credit for good branding decisions, but they are also the first to be blamed when things go wrong.
Searching for New Ideas
Marketing is an industry that always has to innovate, keeping up with new marketing platforms and trends, and following customers as they evolve over time. That’s why your marketing department has to be filled with creative people. But there’s a limit to how many ideas you can acquire from this strategy.
That’s why your marketing department should be open, and integrated with your other departments. Brainstorming across the whole company will ensure that you are maximizing both creativity and innovation. Even on a temporary basis, you should be encouraging a mixing of teams.
Understanding Your Customers Better
Marketers have a good understanding of how a business operates. They understand content marketing, social media marketing, and customer relationships. But other teams in your company also understand the business, just from different angles. By cutting off your marketing department as a separate entity you are losing out on other perspectives.
No matter how good your marketers are at their jobs, they only understand the customer perspective from one angle. They don’t understand the problems that they go to the finance department with, or the issues experienced by the product development department.
To fully understand your customers you need a 360-degree view. The only way you are going to get that is by actually collaborating with everyone else. Multiple customer perspectives will give your marketing team a better idea of what customers like and dislike.
The idea of customer psychology is a big thing, and to get an overall view of it you have to put yourself in the shoes of someone else in a different role.
A More Flexible Company
There are many factors involved with marketing budgets. The concept of traditional advertising is dead and marketing teams are more multi-purpose than at any other time. To become a more flexible company, you need to train your team to do other things.
Not only does this offer an alternative should another part of your operations require some reinforcement, but it will help your marketers understand other aspects of your company. This is something of value that can’t be underestimated.
Last Word – Companies are Becoming More Integrated
This article may have focused on why you shouldn’t leave the marketing team in a silo, but it’s also a lesson for every department in your company. No longer is it possible for an organization to get away with leaving their teams isolated from everything else.
It may seem more practical and logical to do so, but you are cheating yourself out of a number of performance advantages by doing so. How will you integrate your marketing team today?